Polly Vernon has her say
SEVEN LONG LOCKDOWN weeks ago, I wrote about love in the time of corona, thus introducing concepts like: the act of dumping via social distancing, people’s eyes meeting for that very first time across a crowded Zoom, and Corona Girlfriends/ Boyfriends (those who move in with a new love in indecent haste, rather than spend quarantine alone). I promised you an update – so here we are:
Single girlfriends tell me they’re experiencing lockdown as a gratifying reversal to Austen-esque flavoured and paced love affairs; that the tentative, super-slow energy of this time, combined with the social unacceptability of touching other people (especially those you don’t know terribly well, or, y’know, at all), has eradicated the culture of instant app gratification and casual hook-ups.
‘We met on a Zoom community quiz night! He slid into my DMS, asked if I wanted to go for a socially distanced perambulation!’ gushed one, in a far more excited tone than she’d used to tell me she’d spent the weekend at an orgy in the catacombs of the Louvre. ‘We walked, and conversed, and it was very modest and polite but definitely supercharged with unspoken desire!’
Another tells me her corona crush just added her to his Strava running network, which (she claims) is the global pandemic equivalent of someone misplacing their bonnet in the hope you’ll find and return it, and: ‘I GOT AN INFLAMMATORY TEXT FROM MY EX AND DIDN’T RESPOND FOR 48 HOURS!’ says someone else. ‘And then? When I did? My tone was measured, and calm, so reasonable! I’m getting really good at sleeping on things,’ she adds. ‘I used to be really good at sleeping with things.’
A fourth thinks she might be developing feelings for her regular DPD guy, so keeps ordering stuff online, just to see; and a fifth is using her extramarital affair as impetus to keep working out. ‘I send him daily sneaky nudes, so I can’t let things slip,’ she says. (I’m not sure Jane Austen did that, I tell her. She asks how I could possibly know.)
As for the Corona Girlfriends and Boyfriends: inevitably, that whole scene is dissolving like soggy tissue. G has split with his Corona GF after the confusion of them not knowing if they liked each other all that much anyway before lockdown, translated into them realising they definitely didn’t, while cooped up together in the same one-bedroom flat, facing the existential threat of a lifetime, only now… She can’t really leave.
K, meanwhile, is rather less sure about the girl she considered ‘definitely promising’ circa mid-feb, now she’s experiencing her at close quarters and nonstop – only this chick seems increasingly (menacingly) settled; and all in all:
‘Moving in “just for lockdown” is the corona equivalent of getting pregnant accidentally-on-purpose,’ said a mate who’d rebuffed her boyfriend’s attempts to move in with her, on or around 23 March, when lockdown began. ‘You artificially fast-track a relationship at your peril, mark my words.’